War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

by Edwin Black

Speaking with the indistinct drawls and slurred vestigial accents that marked them as hillbillies, dressed in rough-hewn clothing or hand-me-downs, and sometimes diseased or poorly developed due to the long-term effects of squalor and malnutrition, they were easy to despise. They were easily considered alien. Quite simply, polite Virginia society considered them white trash.

But hopes for betterment often became irrelevant because these people inhabited a realm outside the margins of America’s dream.

As such, their lives became a stopping place for America’s long biological nightmare.

considered socially inadequate. More precisely, these hill families were deemed “unfit,” that is, unfit to exist in nature.

so-called

No one was quite sure how “feebleminded” was

mentally-and genetically-defective.

systematically sterilized

Virginia law compelling such operations for those ruled unfit.

Often, the teenage boys and girls placed under the surgeon’s knife did not really com...

Many of the victims did not discover why they could not bear children until decades later when the truth was finally revealed to them by local Virginia investigative reporters and government reformers.

Lower-class white boys and girls from the mountains, from the outskirts of small towns and big city slums were sterilized in assembly line fashion. So were American Indians, Blacks, epileptics and those suffering from certain maladies-day after day, thousands of them as though orchestrated by some giant machine.

Virginia authorities feared that if Buck were permitted to reproduce, his offspring would inherit immutable genetic traits for poverty and low intelligence.

Having children is supposed to be part of the human

Mary Donald was equally pained when she recalled her years of anguish following her sterilization at Lynchburg when she was only eleven. Several years later, she was “released” to her husband-to-be, and then enjoyed a good marriage for eighteen years. But “he loved kids,” she remembered. “I lay in bed and cried because I couldn’t give him a son,” she recounted in her heavily accented but articulate mountain drawl. “You know, men want a son to carry on their name. He said it didn’t matter. But as years went by, he changed. We got divorced and he married someone else.” With these words, Mary broke down and

Moreover, the story of America’s reproductive persecution constitutes far more than just a protracted medical travesty. These simple Virginia people, who thought they were isolated victims, plucked from their remote mountain homes and urban slums, were actually part of a grandiose, decades-long American movement of social and biological cleansing determined to obliterate individuals and families deemed inferior. The intent was to create a new and superior mankind.

The movement was called eugenics. It was conceived at the onset of the twentieth century and implemented by America’s wealthiest, most powerful and most learned men against the nation’s most vulnerable and helpless. Eugenicists sought to methodically terminate all the racial and ethnic groups, and social classes, they disliked or feared. It was nothing less than America’s legalized campaign to breed a super race-and not just any super race. Eugenicists wanted a purely Germanic and Nordic super race, enjoying biological dominion over all

Using the power of money, prestige and international academic exchanges, American eugenicists exported their philosophy to nations throughout the world, including Germany. Decades after a eugenics campaign of mass sterilization and involuntary incarceration of “defectives” was institutionalized in the United States, the American effort to create a super Nordic race came to the attention of Adolf Hitler.

Prior to World War II, the Nazis practiced eugenics with the open approval of America’s eugenic crusaders. As Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, complained in 1934, “Hitler is beating us at our own

in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, eugenic doctors like Josef Mengele would carry on the research begun just years earlier with American financial support, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution. Only after the secrets of Nazi eugenics horrified the world, only after Nuremberg declared compulsory sterilization a crime against humanity, did American eugenics recede, adopt an enlightened view and then resurface as “genetics” and “human engineering.”

Will the twenty-first-century successor to the eugenics movement, now known as “human engineering,” employ enough safeguards to ensure that the biological crimes of the twentieth century will never happen again?

Mankind’s quest for perfection has always turned dark. Man has always existed in perpetual chaos. Continuously catapulted from misery to exhilaration and back, humanity has repeatedly struggled to overcome vulnerability and improve upon its sense of strength.

In 1859, some years after Spencer began to use the term “survival of the fittest,” the naturalist Charles Darwin summed up years of observation in a lengthy abstract entitled The Origin of Species. Darwin espoused “natural selection” as the survival process governing most living things in a world of limited resources and changing environments.

Far-flung notions of social planning, philosophy and biology-centuries in the making-now gravitated toward each other, culminating in a fascinating new ideology that sought to improve the human race-not by war or charity, but by the progressive logic of science and mathematics. The driving force behind this revelation was not really a scientist, although his scientific methodology influenced many

Later, he discovered that the raised ridges on human fingertips were each unique. No two were alike. He devised a system for analyzing and categorizing the distinctive sworls, and inking them into a permanent record. Galton simply called these fingerprints.

Galton reasoned that talent and quality were more than an accident. They could be calculated, managed and sharpened into a “highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.” Far from accepting any of Malthus’s notions of inhibited procreation, Galton suggested that

bountiful breeding of the best people would evolve mankind into a superlative species of grace and quality. He actually hoped to create a regulated marriage process where members of the finest families were only wed to carefully selected

He didn’t have the answer yet, but Galton was certain that the secret of scientific breeding could be revealed-and that it would forever change humankind. “Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?” he asked.

In 1883, Galton published Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development and created a new term for his discipline. He played with many names for his new science. Finally, he scrawled Greek letters on a hand-sized scrap of paper, and next to them the two English fragments he would join into one. The Greek word for well was abutted to the Greek word for born.

Families would be shattered, generations would be wiped away, whole peoples would be nearly erased-all in the name of Galton’s word. The word he wrote on that small piece of paper was eugenics.

In theory, the master of any enforced eugenics program could play God-deciding who would be born and who would not.

German cellular biologist August Weismann, using more powerful microscopes, announced that something called “germ plasm” was the true vehicle of heredity.

In other words, every person was the measurable and predictable sum of his ancestors’ immortal germ plasm. Inheritable traits included not only physical characteristics, such as eye color and height, but subtle qualities, such as intellect, talent and personality. Galton ultimately reduced all notions of heritage, talent and character to a series of complex, albeit fatally flawed, eugenic

mixing eugenically well-endowed humans with inferior mates would not strengthen succeeding generations. Rather, it would promote a downward biological

Yet Galton himself was forced to admit in 1892, in the preface to the second edition of Hereditary Genius, that his theories and formulae were still completely unprovable.

warned that musing about “improved breeds” of the human race were still nothing more than “speculations on the theoretical

environment and the quality of existence were by and large irrelevant and actually an impediment to racial improvement. No amount of social progress or intervention could help the unfit, he insisted.

“I do not, of course, propose to neglect the sick, the feeble or the unfortunate. I would do all … for their comfort and happiness, but I would exact an equivalent for the charitable assistance they receive, namely, that by means of isolation, or some other drastic yet adequate measure, a stop should be put to the production of families of children likely to include

Galton believed “what Nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and

“Eugenics,” asserted Galton, “is the study of all agencies under social control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future

“positive eugenics,” that is, suggesting, facilitating, predicting and even legally mandating biologically conducive marriages.

His convictions, even those involving legislation and marriage regimentation, were, within his own utopian context, deemed noninvasive and nondestructive.

Galton’s notions of voluntary family planning and positive governmental structures would be transmogrified into an entirely different constellation of negative and coercive thought. The new faithful called it “negative eugenics.” Galton died in 1911.

What Galton hoped to inspire in society, others were determined to force upon their fellow man.

Only then could genetic destiny be achieved for the human race-or rather, the white race, and more specifically, the Nordic race.

The new tactics would include segregation, deportation, castration, marriage prohibition, compulsory sterilization, passive euthanasia-and ultimately extermination.

In America, eugenics would become more than an abstract philosophy; it would become an obsession for policymakers.

CHAPTER 3

Page 21

American eugenicists believed the unfit were essentially subhuman, not worthy of developing as members of society. The unfit were diseased, something akin to a genetic infection.

selective breeding-spaying